The configuration you see above is what Maingear calls the "Better" setup for the Pulse 14, and it calls for $1,399 (about £825, AU$1,497). The company offers a low end version for $1,199 (around £703, AU$1,274). With that, you would lose the solid-state drive cache for a 500GB, 7,200 rpm drive, be bumped down to a dual-core Core i5 chip and suffer a small frequency hit to the RAM (1,600MHz).

Looking for the best possible Pulse 14? Then you'll have to pony up a whopping $1,699 (about £996, AU$1,806) for the same CPU as the mid-range model, double the memory and a 256GB SSD (2 x 128GB in SuperRAID), 1TB HDD combo. Oh, and the same video card is offered across all configurations – strange indeed.

Now, when you consider the Alienware 14 comes in at just $40 less – $1,359 (around £797, AU$1,444) – for last year's GTX 750M, this Pulse 14 looks like a decent value. But Alienware also offers a slightly beefier Core i7-4710MQ chip, while essentially matching Maingear part for part elsewhere, in one of the industry's leading builds replete with custom keyboard and frame lighting. Plus, a GPU refresh from Alienware is inevitable.

It's really the Gigabyte P34G that throws Maingear's pricing into question. For $1,549 (about £908, AU$1,646) on Amazon, its only configuration, the recently-revised 14-incher sports a superior GTX 860M GPU, a slightly slower Core i7-4700MQ processor, 8GB of RAM and a massive 128GB SSD, 1TB HDD combo. Plus, the P34G is thinner and lighter than either laptop, and touts a backlit keyboard and easy overclocking software to boot. All that for just another $150? Not too shabby. And you might be able to find last year's model for around the same price as Maingear's.

What Maingear touts as a differentiator in its notebooks is the custom paint jobs the company offers, which look gorgeous – I've seen them on previous models. But are they an extra $99 (around £58, AU$105) gorgeous? I'm not so sure. Sadly, our review unit was without any such glamor.

Even worse is that, for this price, the Pulse 14 has little in the way of extra features. No backlit keyboard here, even. (Though, it does come bloatware-free.) What you're getting for $1,400 isn't all that comparable to the competition. At any rate, let's take a look at how the laptop.